


A Watsonian Interpretation

by nbenrey-real (celestial_archivist)



Series: A Watsonian Perspective [1]
Category: HLVRAI - Fandom, Half-Life VR But The AI Is Self Aware
Genre: Gen, They/Themrey, also since this involves so many headcanons reinterpretations of canon and off-the-wall concepts, and thus i must write out my wild ass ideas on how things work in the in-kayfabe universe, in the watsonian vs. doylist interpretations of any given canon i am a hardcore watsonian, it might as well be an au, this has spoilers for some of the rest of the series!!, this is a slightly edited crosspost from tumblr for explanation purposes, why yes i am including john freeman in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:00:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25165861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestial_archivist/pseuds/nbenrey-real
Summary: The HLVRAI Incident is the result of three different realities on differing ‘Singularity Levels’- points of where an sapient entity reaches a threshold of awareness of levels ‘above’ them that their perception process becomes incomprehensible to their native zones levels- interacting in a domino effect thanks to one certain eldritch entities desire to give his Mixed-Singularity-Level kid a good 37th birthday party at chuck-e-cheese.These are: Reality 6-3411, Reality P14Y3R, Reality 41VR41, and Proxy-Realities 814354.
Series: A Watsonian Perspective [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1806124
Comments: 1
Kudos: 32





	A Watsonian Interpretation

**Author's Note:**

> this is a crosspost from my tumblr, which explains some basics of this interpretation of HLVRAI, because my hyperfixating ass could NOT let this go. It's got a lot of metaphysics nonsense referencing cyberpunk terms, vaguely cthulhu-mythos style reality perception bullshit, and of course a bunch of player-interaction-horseshit thats blatantly the result of undertale and deltarune meta-analysis.

**The HLVRAI Incident** is the result of three different realities on differing ‘Singularity Levels’- points of where an sapient entity reaches a threshold of awareness of levels ‘above’ them that their perception process becomes incomprehensible to their native zones levels- interacting in a domino effect thanks to one certain eldritch entities desire to give his Mixed-Singularity-Level kid a good 37th birthday party at chuck-e-cheese.

These are:  
 **Reality 6-3411** , **Reality P14Y3R** , **Reality 41VR41** , and **Proxy-Realities 814354**. 

**Reality 6-3411** is where the entity referred to as **Gregory ‘G-Man’ Goodman’s** Species resides- a race of enigmatic creatures known simply as 'Operators', who regularly interact with lower Singularity Levels in hopes of uplifting other sapient beings to their level of influence and knowledge, often incubating their young in those realities in order to better communicate. 

G-Man is part of a team of Operators charged with interacting with Reality P14Y3R through pre-existing proxy realities, looking for promising candidates- during which he inadvertently began interacting with Reality 41VR41 to a startling degree. Details are fuzzy, but at some point he was graced with a child by a member of that Singularity Level, currently known as **Tommy Coolatta**. 

Tommy, being born into a lower singularity level with no guarantee of reaching one higher, is difficult to care for properly without harm- G-Man made the decision to leave him in an area so he’d be raised by members of that level while G-Man watched from the sidelines for potential **Singularity Level Increase** \- however, time can be hard for ‘higher’- entities to understand, and he didn’t realize how long it really had been, especially given the demands of his employers. 

While his employers _did_ have a vested interest in Tommy’s case, by the time G-Man is made aware of the circumstances of Tommy’s increasing access to higher-levels of perception of time- beginning with ‘seeing fast’ when drinking soda five years before the Black Mesa Incident and slowly progressing from there- Tommy had been inadvertently trapped in one of those pre-existing **Proxy-Realities** and could not be extracted without assistance from an entity of Reality P14Y3R interacting with a ‘Player Avatar’ based on Proxy-Realities connected to Reality 41VR41.

**Reality P14Y3R** is one of many realities that commonly interact with a multitude of naturally-occurring Proxy-Realities, often being interpreted as works of fiction to entities from that said level or being created by those same entities themselves. Entities from this reality are capable of interacting with **Proxy-Realities** , which are naturally occurring buffer-zones that separate this reality to those of it’s ‘fiction’ and vice-versa, making them ideal candidates for Reality 6-3411 to utilize in their machinations- detriments to those ‘Player Avatars’ that happen to be caught in the crossfire from lower Singularity Levels notwithstanding.

In terms familiar to those who played undertale? It’s **you**!

**Proxy-Realities 814354** include a variety of shifting sub-realities, namely taking the form of Half-Life/Black Mesa, a science fiction first-person shooter where an entity from Reality P14Y3R takes control of the **Player Avatar** _Gordon Freeman_ , a scientist working at Black Mesa. Included in this reality are a variety of AI created by entities from Reality P14Y3R, of which a few begin to increase in Singularity Level.

The first to gain proper Singularity is an entity known as **Benrey** , who proceeds to gain awareness of Reality P14Y3R and subsequently reinterprets their world through that knowledge- they are in a game with a script, a world that is not real, death is meaningless and you will simply heal or respawn in time- the only point is to help the other A.I.s grow, have fun, and make it interesting for the **Player**. 

Benrey quickly removes themselves from the games code, becoming something of an anomaly on their native level and a **Netrunner** of sorts on the P14Y3R level- they also notice several other AI with increasing Singularity Levels, chiefly among them: 

  * **Frozen** , an entity who has knowledge of things from Reality P14Y3R but no self-awareness of such, apparently suffering some amount of confusion as a result but largely harmless.
  * **Shep** , an entity that gains a level of awareness comparable to their own extremely quickly, soon becoming bored- later progressing into apathetic depression.
  * **Tommy Coolatta** , an oddity that is almost entirely free of the script and has somehow imported a High-Singularity entity called **Sunkist** into their reality, acting as a companion.
  * **Dr. Harold Pontiff Coomer** , a hive-intelligence still deeply-entrenched in the script but with increasing awareness of the limits of their reality.
  * **Bubby** , a highly-divergent entity who largely lacks awareness but has almost entirely deviated from the script.
  * **Darnold** , an entity largely content with their role who nonetheless has some subconscious awareness of the nature of their reality & is highly deviated from the script.



Though somewhat limited in knowledge of other Reality Levels, Benrey’s observations of the behavior of their companions allows them to come to the conclusion that they need to continue the natural formula of their Proxy-Reality in order to keep their companions stable and potentially allow them to similarly break free of the games script and code.

Singularity Level changes tends to result in a certain amount of dissociation resulting from the **sheer influx of information and perceptual changes** , with young Singularities often becoming aggressive or depersonalized from emotions for a period- Benrey’s further reliance on the script as a guide while largely ignoring true interaction combined with interpretation of everything from a P14Y3R Level worsens this over time, likely exacerbated by **Shep** choosing to abandon the game-world as soon as he gains Netrunnig capability, leaving Benrey as the only wholly self-aware entity.

Combined with Sensory/Auditory Processing Issues and Aphasia, the resulting entity is confusing, eclectic, and esoteric at the best of times, with a habit of latching onto odd phrasing and obscure personal neologisms- making communication difficult to implausible for entities such as G-Man or Gordon, who are unaware of Benrey’s intentions, habits, or goals.

**Reality 41VR41** is a reality level that shares traits with a variety of media found in Reality P14Y3R, namely the presence of Black Mesa, Aperture Science, and various realities connected via proxy-node-networks. This is directly connected to **Proxy-Realities 814354**.

Included in this reality is one **Gordon Freeman** , an 41VR41 native, single father, and hard working scientist at Black Mesa that found himself mis-introduced to the Proxy Realities due to **Metaphysical Similarity** \- the result of G-Man’s machinations to retrieve his son Tommy which simply caught him in the crossfire, a most unfortunate coincidence.

As a result of entering Proxy-Realities 814354, Gordon was transposed into the position of the **Player Avatar** that his unaware counterpart usually fulfilled, in essence becoming a semi-possessed puppet being influenced by entities native to the P14Y3R Level- a circumstance that Benrey was not fully aware and comprehending of initially.

Over the course of the events that followed, Gordon slowly became aware of the disparities between the knowledge of his perceived reality 41VR41, the Proxy-Reality he now resided in, and the increasing awareness of the **P14Y3R Level** which was influencing him. 

Benrey also began to become aware of the discrepancy between what they knew of their Proxy-Realities and the apparent origin of this new entity- which combined with increasing subconscious awareness of aspects of their **Metaphysical Counterpart** in Reality 41VR41- resulted in an slight increase in Singularity Level that caused increasing disorientation. 

Benrey simply fell back on following the script to compensate, resulting in Gordon's own interpretations and increasing **Singularity Level** to create a feedback-loop of alterations to the Proxy-Reality and permutations of the Script- resulting in Benrey being assigned to the final boss script, their defeat, and subsequent dis-incorporation into the net for some time. 

**Post-Incident** , G-Man continues to Monitor the group, his employers having become highly interested in such a complicated case and he himself feeling some amount of guilt over how much his simple plan of ‘let me put my kid down for a second for the reality level natives to watch them’ managed to make Tommy an orphan and royally fuck up so many young Singularities, an entire Proxy-Reality, and a 41VR41 native who now has a significant amount of burden to bear about his role in all this.

 **Gordon** , now an Ex-Player-Avatar with some buried knowledge of the nature of the realities he interacts with and an increased Singularity Level, has gained access to some of the same abilities Benrey utilized- namely **Netrunning** , which he utilizes to purposefully move his AI companions between Reality 41VR41 and various P14Y3R-Level-Connected Proxy-Realities in order to assist them in reaching the Singularity Level necessary to function safely and adequately in his native level. 

Essentially, Gordon purposefully puts himself in the position of being a continual Player-Avatar- in spite of the existential nightmare it is- because he wants to make sure his friends can go on to live lives outside of Game Scripts and Weird Transreality Horseshit. He just happens to choose to do so in a way that involves things like beating the shit out of cops and stealing money from banks, because fuck you i’ve earned this. I can have a little ultraviolence, as a treat. 

**Benrey** meanwhile has reincorporated, now entirely free to act as a Netrunner and game as they please- however, given the status of their native Proxy-Reality as ‘decommissioned’, they’ve instead been booted into Reality 41VR41 as their new native-zone with the other members of the Science Team. This poses a significant problem for them, as they have no context of how to live as a non-proxy entity beyond vague recollections gained from their Metaphysical Counterpart and has no actual presence in said reality- they’re still kind of expecting everything to just reset and put them back.

 **Tommy Coolatta** \- having found out that Benrey had been largely staying in the stops for the bus-lines that used to go to the Black Mesa facility when they weren’t joining in on heists or hanging out with him- proceeded to immediately take to waking up Gordon at 3 am in the morning for two weeks in a row because ‘its storming really bad and they don’t have anywhere else to sleep mr. freeman and he gets so worried its so cold they don’t know how cold works-’, resulting in gordon just saying fuck it and making Benrey join the Science Team household.

Tommy, also noticing the way Gordon keeps walking on a tightrope just to keep going another day, wishes he could help. As his awareness increases thanks to Netrunning and general observation, he notices strings in the world around him- the same ones he's seen his dad pluck at to nudge things in a particular direction. Knowing his fathers employers tend to take their sweet time in labeling someone 'worth bothering with'- and seeing the way Gordon takes to Netrunning in spite of everything else he has to deal with- Tommy reaches out, plucks a string, and nudges things just slightly so Gordon can forgo the 'interview process' entirely, if he so chooses. 

So now Benrey lives in the house Gordon had to buy for the science team to move in with him since ‘you all keep crashing at my place anyways and god damn it i can’t leave any of you alone for a minute, bubby has started so many fires-’ and now Gordon feels obligated to keep track of the jackass because fucking hell, they don’t even know how to microwave things, they’re going to fucking die. Which then promptly turns into genuine concern because jesus christ their memory is complete garbage how are they functioning like this. 

Gordon largely splits his time between caring for Joshua, making everyone do things to encourage neuroplasticity like tangrams, dragging them into whatever Player Interactions G-Man says look promising, and trying to wrangle them so they stop utterly destroying the household minecraft server, come on guys, between benrey and bubby they’ve single handedly resulted in the banning of both tnt and all firespread, can you just chill- COOMER STOP PUNCHING THE GODDAMN HORSES.

Meanwhile Gordon’s brother, **John Freeman** , laboratory office worker and part-time stunt-motorcyclist- who had been babysitting Joshua during all of this horseshit and was about ready to storm Black Mesa his damn self- has not a fucking clue what the hell is going on and why his brother is suddenly 200% more off the shits than normal, now in possession of a prosthetic hand, talking about video games controlling him or something, and in the company of an entire family of eldritch bullshit people who might be robots or something he’s not really sure???


End file.
